An age-old dilemma when choosing an agency for your website design project is: full-service agency? Or specialist agency? Many people assume that using a specialist firm for each stage of their website project will lead to the best result. This assumption ignores some facts. By fully informing yourself on the benefits of trusting your website design project to a full-service agency, the answer to this dilemma becomes clear.

Why Choose a Full-Service Agency?

A main misconception in the distinction between full-service and specialist agencies is that the designers, developers and strategists at the specialist agencies are better at their craft. There’s no reason to believe this. Here’s why:

• Talent and technical skill are distributed across the creative/digital industry. A full-service agency often has a more talented team, in the same way that a super group draws the best musicians from many bands
• For this reason, it’s important to worry less about the skill of an agency’s workers, because that will usually be the same or better at a full-service agency
• Instead, prioritize other factors like cost and timeliness, to help make your decision easier

Full-Service Agency Efficiencies

While it may seem like many specialist firms are the way to go, this can be more expensive and timely in the long run. There is value in getting all of your creative and digital services from one place:

• It saves the time of a repetitive discovery and onboarding process, and the conversations that come with this
• It allows your agency to understand the full vision for your website project
• Websites are difficult to explain the same way over and over, and your vision can easily be misinterpreted
• You want to establish a comfortable collaborative partnership with your agency
• Working with one agency makes it easier to achieve consistency across the website project

Another efficiency comes from the time savings of designers, developers, and marketers working together. Coordinating a marketing campaign on the fly is much easier when the designer and marketer work next to one another. There is no need to send requests back and forth. It’s the same when creating a website, and the designers and developers can collaborate in real time, saving you time and money.

For these reasons, the overhead of a website project decreases when working with one full-service agency, rather than several specialists. You should especially look for a boutique agency, with experts in every role, but without a huge staff. And if your project does require something really specific, a good full-service agency will have the connections to put you in touch with the correct specialist.

Find an agency that can lead you through website planning, information architecture, market research, wireframing, web design, programming, and website testing.